He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right?

Donald Trump said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t make a military move into Ukraine — even though Putin already has done just that, seizing the country’s Crimean Peninsula.

“He’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want,” Trump said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” Stephanopoulos responded, in a reference to Crimea, which Putin took from Ukraine in early 2014.

At this point I see Basil Fawlty in my mind’s eye, backpedalling furiously. “Oh well he’s there – but – “

Trump said: “OK — well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He takes Crimea.”

Stephanopoulos interjected to note that Trump has suggested he could recognize Russia’s claim on Crimea over Ukraine’s — and Trump didn’t back away from that possibility in the interview.

“I’m going to take a look at it,” he said. “But you know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also … just so you understand, that was done under Obama’s administration.”

He has no idea what they’re talking about, does he. It could be Paraguay or Mongolia or Zimbabwe and he wouldn’t know the difference.

The Clinton campaign responded later Sunday, with senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan saying: “What is he talking about? Russia is already in Ukraine. Does he not know that? What else doesn’t he know?”

“Today, (Trump) gamely repeated Putin’s argument that Russia was justified in seizing the sovereign territory of another country by force. This is scary stuff,” Sullivan said in a statement. “But it shouldn’t surprise us. This comes on the heels of his tacit invitation to the Russians to invade our NATO allies in Eastern Europe.”

Yes, but he’s his own foreign policy expert, so this is to be expected. What’s the old saying about people who act as their own lawyers? That they have fools for clients. Same thing here.

It really is appalling he has got this far. It would be easier to take if he were running for office in Paraguay or Mongolia or Zimbabwe and not the most powerful nation on Earth. I have this fantasy that this is some sort of performance art piece and that at some point he’s going to drop the mask and say how ashamed he is for his country that he was able to carry his prank off for as long as he was able to. Like I said, fantasy.

How is it that people who should be nowhere near the levers of power end up being invited to step up to them? It was bad enough with W (and Cheney), Palin still has more attention than she should,and now the monstrous clown?